These stories are the ones that strike us as having been the most interesting, the most impactful in terms of the evolution creation debate or because we didnât want to rename this article the Top 7 Science Stories of 2011 for Christians/Creationists. This year weâve only selected 11 stories but remember; weâre in a recession.

Our selections are printed here in no particular order.

1)Science Keeps on Marching Backward: Science ‘Walks Back Some Dubious Claims in 2011

In 2009 and 2010 Ardi and Ida were both effectively debunked as human ancestors within six to eight months of their worldwide discovery announcements, setting new records âfor scientists had previously thoughtâ reversals.

In terms of past dubious claims, it had taken NASA 11 years to march back from its 1976 alleged alien life on a meteorite discovery. On Friday, March 4th of last year NASA had another opportunity to march science backward with “alien claims”. Nasa scientist Richard Hoover published a peer reviewed article in the Journal âCosmologyâ with the claim that that he had found tiny fossils of alien life in the remnants of a meteorite.

This story was published internationally under headlines like: âNASA Scientist Finds âAlien Lifeâ Fossilsâ. Naturally, the NASA connection seemingly provided some support to the alien claim which was met with excitement-and skepticism.

Hold that thought for a minute before; the rest of the story.

In another area of scientific dubiosity; âTwenty years ago the palaeontological community gasped as geoscientists revealed evidence for the oldest bacterial fossils on the planet.â..naturenews

The evidence here was a piece of rock found in Australia known as the Apex Chert and it contained it was said evidence of the earliest life on earth. Scientists declared that the Apex Chert was 3.5 billion years old, whereas Genesis would set its maximum age at 10,000 years or less. Late last year there was a development re the Apex Chert as described by this headline:

âWhoops! Scientists left red-faced as oldest âevidence of lifeâ turns out to be iron deposits.â

Whoops indeed. And what about all those evolution adherents who had snootily quoted this âfactâ to non-evolution believers for twenty years? This âscientists had previously thoughtâ item took even longer than the 1976 NASA âdiscoveryâ to reverse.

Getting back to NASA scientist Richard Hooverâs âalien life fossilsâ.

They were announced on a Friday and disavowed by âtop scientists in different disciplinesâ, including NASA by the following Monday, by noon, setting new standards for scientists had previously thought type reversals. No alien fossils and quite probably no bacterial fossils.

Finally there were the international headlines about the “God Particle”. Science it was said was very close to discovering the “God Particle”, which is a major tenet of materialist beliefs about the creation of the universe is a supposed fundamenal particle reponsible for the creation of the mass of the universe’s mass. Two weeks after the banner headlines about the closeness the world of science was to the discovery we learn in less banner headlines that the particle may not exist.

What doesn’t exist any more are the billions of tax dollars that went into the constructiion of the giant CERN particle accellerator in Geneva.

2) A 2011 Gallop poll indicates that 92% of Americans affirm a belief in God. A surprise; Atheists are more likely to live on the East Coast than the West Coast.

Apparently, one of the un-cleverest things that a presidential candidate could utter these days is that they believe that Genesis is the literal story of how the universe was created and that they personally believe that man and dinosaur co-existed. Even the Republican candidates would be hard pressed to say that publically even if theyâre trying to win South Carolina.

So, the Atheists and evolutionists must be winning, right? Not so fast.

âA poll released by Gallup yesterday confirmed what a deeply religious America continues to be 92 percent of Americans still say “yes” when asked the basic question “Do you believe in God?” In 1947, this number was 94 percent. Considering the events over the past 60 years, this is a remarkably stable statistic to say the least.

Gallup notes that in particular, the belief in God is high across all subgroups of the population, but there are variances. Women are more likely to believe in God than men. Liberals are less likely to believe than conservatives. Young people are the least likely to believe.

Those with a post-graduate education are less likely to believe than high school or college graduates. Finally, East Coast Americans are the least likely to believe in God, and Southerners are the most, with the West and the Midwest coming in equally in between.

But how do we stack up against other countries? A 2008 Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey reveal that only 1 in 4 of our neighbors up north believe in God. And a 2005 Eurostat poll indicated that the French, perhaps our cultural opposite, had the highest atheism in Europe — 33% responded that they believed in “neither a Spirit, God, or life force.”

Here is the breakdown of the Gallup poll for U.S. adults.â

In concert with these poll findings other recent polls continue to show that Atheists are the most distrusted group in America although Muslims and Scientologists have made up some ground.

Elsewhere:A University of Minnesota Study on âAmerican Attitudes Towards Atheists & Atheismâ
Finds that Atheists are Most Despised, Most Distrusted Minority.. The findings indicate that Americans are least likely to vote for an Atheist for President than any other group. What would happen if a Christian acknowledging that he believed in a literal reading of Genesis ran against an Atheist?

3) Darwinists Alarmed at Teachersâ Caution Over Evolution

Jan 29, 2011 â âCreationismâ refuses to die in American high schools. Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania sounded the alarm in Science, with suggestions for what to do about it. The only suggestion off the table was to have debates about the evidence; no, that was completely out of the question: the report was focused on âDefeating Creationism.â

Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, professors of political science at U Penn, surveyed a ânational representative probability sampleâ of 926 high school biology teachers about their teaching of evolution. Only about 28% of the respondents consistently teach evolution âunabashedlyâ.

The rest are either bashful or unabashedly âcreationistâ when teaching the subject of origins, the survey found. 13% of the teachers âexplicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least 1 hour of class time presenting it in a positive light (an additional 5% of teachers report that they endorse creationism in passing or when answering student questions).â

This sounds like a very small amount of time to worry about in a semester-long course, but Berkman and Plutzerâs alarm was palpable: âThe boldness and confidence of this minority should not be underestimated.â

Of greater concern, however, (to evolutionists) âthe cautious 60%â who sit on the fence to avoid controversy. Some of them avoid the topic, or just teach to the test, or teach various views to let the students make up their own minds. Few of the fence-sitters are advocates of young-earth creationism, which Berkman and Plutzer said âwould prevent them from becoming strong advocates for evolutionary biology.â

The authors worry that many students, who will take biology as their only science course, will fail to hear from these cautious teachers the âevidence that evolution has occurred,â and that instruction in evolution will be âabsent, cursory, or fraught with misinformationâ in American high schools.

They worry about a âcycle of ignoranceâ in many communities, especially the âsocially conservativeâ communities, where more of the âcreationistâ and âcautiousâ teachers tend to reside. The cycle must be broken to prevent a âsystematic undermining of science.â Source: The fantasticCreationEvolutionHeadlines

4) Peer reviewed scientific paper claims that the geological time scale could be off as much as 99%.

Guy Berthault, the author of the study is a graduate of The Ecole Polytechnique, France, and a member of the International Association of Sedimentologists and lives in Paris, France. The article is entitled âAnalysis of the Main Principles of Stratigraphy on the Basis of Experimental Dataâ, and although it reaches some startling conclusions itâs caused barely a ripple in the millions of years geological continuum.

They are walking by faith and not by sight (or site) so that mere evidence is not going to impact them.

âWhen I started my experiments on strata formation I was surprised to find how little work had been done on the subject in the past. Of course, sediments had been examined and flume experiments performed in connection with building and other projects, but none with the object of explaining the mechanics of stratification.

I searched the data banks but found little to help with my research. I began to realize that the basic principles of superposition, continuity and initial horizontality laid down in the seventeenth century had been accepted, albeit with developments, virtually without question. There seemed to have been little attempt to examine the actual mechanics involved.

Yet a few simple experiments, first with laminae and later with strata revealed that the time needed for micro or macro strata formation was of quite a different order to that generally accepted. The implications were far-reaching both as concerns the geological time-scale and the fossil record.” Source: Author’s Site

“This year, 2011, is the 150th anniversary of the first Archaeopteryx specimen being unearthed from the famous Solnhofen limestone lagerstĂ¤tte. With its feathered, lizard-like tail; two-clawed, stubby wings; a bill-shaped muzzle with teeth but no keratin coating; feet capable of perching and unlike those of small dinosaurs; a âwishboneâ and lightweight bones, Archaeopteryx was just the half-and-half missing link in the fossil record so desperately needed to support Darwinâs Origin of Species, published two years beforehand.

It has remained controversial ever since, even having been claimed to be a forgery by such luminaries as cosmologist Fred Hoyle in 1985, despite its superbly preserved intricacies and the existence at the time of 6 slightly different specimens from the same source some discovered long after Hoyleâs supposed master craftsman must have died.

Creationists soon after the first discovery claimed it was simply a bird created on a Friday together with fish (Genesis 1:20) and must have predated dinosaurs by a day, as they were created on the 6th Day along with all the âcattle and creeping thing and beast of the earthâ (Genesis 1:24-31).

That scurrilous sect will certainly leap gleefully on the new discovery of a feathered dinosaur from the ever productive Late Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation in NE China (Xu, X. et al.2011. An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of the Avialae. Nature, v. 475, p. 465-470) because ironically, by itself, it could be said to be a missing link too.â

In fact, Xiaotingia zhengi possesses features very like those displayed by Archaeopteryx but convincingly close affinities to deinonychosaurian dinosaurs. The shared features show that neither is a bird (Avialae) and nor are they part of the clade that evolved to birds: they are part of the growing group of feathered dinosaurs that may well have glided or even flown.

As Lawrence Witmer of Ohio University has observed (Witmer, L.M. 201. An icon knocked off its perch. Nature, v. 475, p. 458-459),

âThis finding is likely to be met with considerable controversy (if not outright horror)âŚâ.

6)More Fear of Creationists: Pssst! Donât tell the creationists, but scientists donât have a clue about how life began..

John Horgan writing for Scientific American wanted to use that headline 20 years ago when writing about the sad state of science with respect to the origin of life but couldn’t get away with it then. See, science is absolutely certain that life didnât begin as it is described in Genesis but unfortunately science has no satisfactory alternative explanation. Well actually, they have dozens of alternative, mutually exclusive alternative explanations for the origin of life.

Youâre not a scientist? Donât know much about biology? How about life comes from life? Biogensis, life from life is all anyone knows but science is sure by faith that abiogenesis; life from non-life somehow occurred.

Mr. Horgan is letting us know from the inside that despite their assurance after many years no one has any idea how abiogenesis could have happened.

âResearchers from the USA and Chile reported, in November 2011, a remarkable bone bed on the west coast of northern Chile near the port city of Caldera, about 700 kilometres (440 miles) north of the capital, Santiago. Excavations uncovered the remains of some 80 baleen whales of which more than 20 specimens were complete.

They also found other kinds of marine mammals including an extinct dolphin with tusks and a sperm whale.

The previous year, construction workers upgrading the Pan-American Highway discovered the fossil site in a road cut just north of Caldera. Since then, teams of scientists led by palaeontologist Nick Pyenson from the Smithsonian Institute and Mario Suarez from the nearby Museo Paleontologico de Caldera have been working to excavate the fossils while the road works were temporarily suspended.

The fossils alongside the highway are confined to a sandstone ridge about 20 metres (70 feet) wide and 240 metres (800 feet) long. Most whales were about 8 metres (25 feet) long, and perfectly preserved. Some whales were so close together that they overlapped one another. The site in a corner of the Atacama Desert is now well above sea level and over a kilometre from the shore. Suarez said it was well known that whale bones jutted out of the ridge, which was given the name Cerro Ballena, or Whale Hill.

Paleontologists were thrilled to find the treasure trove, describing it as âvery unusualâ. Pyenson thinks the whales all died âmore or less at the same timeâ after they were trapped in a lagoon. Others suggest they became disoriented and beached themselves.

Paleontologist Erich Fitzgerald from Museum Victoria in Australia said itâs possible the remains accumulated over thousands of years. Whale expert Hans Thewissen from Northeast Ohio Medical University thought the whales might have gathered in a lagoon and been stranded by an earthquake or storm. After the connection to the ocean closed, the lagoon dried up and the whales died.

The puzzle of how these marine creatures died has caught news headlines with one reporting âFossil Bonanza Poses Mysteryâ. Another asked, âHow did 75 whales end up in the desert?â

Interestingly, some of those posting comments on these news reports suggested the creatures perished in Noahâs Flood. Robert Raeburn of Western Australia said, âThe whales probably swam there when the whole world was covered in water, about 4000 years ago at the time of Noah. They would then have been stranded when the waters assuaged (drained back) to expose the dry land. âŚ This all makes sense when viewed from a âBibleâ perspective.â An email friend suggested the same to Mario Suarez, one of the lead paleontologists. Not surprisingly, this idea generated a deal of web comments.

What stops people making the obvious connection between these fossils and Noahâs Flood? Itâs the million-year ages assigned to the fossils.

The field evidence for large-scale catastrophe is overwhelming as these research scientists have reported. What stops people making the obvious connection between these fossils and Noahâs Flood? Itâs the million-year ages assigned to the fossils.

On one comments thread Holly from the USA responded to the Noahâs Flood idea with, âNothing from the Bible perspective makes sense, since 4,000 years ago that area wasnât covered with water. However it was about 2 million years ago.â â

8)Everything that You thought you knew about dinosaurs is wrong! Again!

Were dinosaurs cold or warm blooded? Bi pedal or quadrupedal? Did the hold their heads erect or down? Omnivore, carnivore or vegetarian?

An article written in 2000 in Discover Magazine informs us that no one knows what dinosaurs looked like (except the people who saw them?) A 2009 article in LiveScience suggests that paleontologists have overestimated the girth of certain dinosaurs by as much as a third to a half-all this time.

In 2009 also UC Berkeley paleontologist Mark Goodwin and his partner Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies concluded that many dinosaurs once thought to represent new or separate species may have been new or separate at all.

A miniature creature known as Nanotyrannus, the recently discovered “tiny tyrant” that resembled the ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex, may have been nothing more than a juvenile version of the big dinosaur. And a giant headed, frill-necked creature that its discoverers called Torosaurus turns out to be only an old-age stage of the well-known plant-eating Triceratops.

And Hogwartia, the famous dinosaur that looked like a dragon!!? Just a plain old Pachycephalosaurus!

(What now will become of Chrisparkerosaurus!?

Is the constant shuffling of dinosaurs and dinosaur identifications the result of scientists seeking personal glory or the results of a field, paleontology, which is to science what Dennyâs is to haute cuisine?

Yes!

Elsewhere on Horner and Dinosaur Identification Problems: âDinosaur Classification Is a Mess CreationevolutionHeadlines

May 13, 2011 â Are there a thousand species of dinosaurs â or far fewer? John Horner, a dinosaur hunter himself, thinks the classification is a mess and wants to clean it up. According to Science Magazine News Horner is worried that âwith almost 1000 types of dinosaurs on record and a new species being named somewhere in the world every 2 weeksâtoo many supposedly new discoveries are actually duplicates of animals already on the books.â Another paleontologist, Michael J. Benton, estimates that over half of the named dinosaurs are misclassified.

Apparently human pride is to blame. âPart of the problem, Horner says, is that scientists are sometimes too keen on finding and naming new dinosaurs.â Naming a new dinosaur gets you noticed and published. As a result, fossil hunters tend to focus on the differences instead of the similarities.

Additionally, âpaleontologists are coming to realize that the bones of an adult dinosaur can be very different from those of a juvenile animal of the same species and can easily mislead scientists into thinking they are two different species.â..âŚ.CreationEvolutionHeadlines

9) Some âNon-Avian Feathered Dinosaursâ May Have Been BirdsOh, I see; some of your non sequential, ill-logical thoughts have been formed into words

Did you follow that? Some “non-bird” feathered dinosaurs may have been birds?

Science writer Jennifer Viegas in Discovery News summarizes a research paper which had been published in February 2009 Medical Hypotheses. What is a non-avian dinosaur? Or more to the point, why are certain of God’s creatures known broadly as non-avian dinosaurs?

After all, aren’t all creatures either avians or non-avians?

It’s because in the absence of that description people would think that they were birds! In order to support the evolutionists current dinosaur to bird mythology, however, science needs these birds to be dinosaurs.

10)Scientists Continue to Marvel at How Much the Universe is Fined Tuned for Human Life

Existence: Why is the Universe Just Right for us?
by Marcus Chown NewScientist, July 29, 2011

“IT HAS been called the Goldilocks paradox. If the strong nuclear force which glues atomic nuclei together were only a few per cent stronger than it is, stars like the sun would exhaust their hydrogen fuel in less than a second. Our sun would have exploded long ago and there would be no life on Earth. If the weak nuclear force were a few per cent weaker, the heavy elements that make up most of our world wouldnât be here, and neither would you….(Chown)

If gravity were a little weaker than it is, it would never have been able to crush the core of the sun sufficiently to ignite the nuclear reactions that create sunlight; a little stronger and, again, the sun would have burned all of its fuel billions of years ago. Once again, we could never have arisen.

Such instances of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics seem to abound. Many of the essential parameters of nature â the strengths of fundamental forces and the masses of fundamental particles â seem fixed at values that are âjust rightâ for life to emerge. A whisker either way and we would not be here. It is as if the universe was made for us.

What are we to make of this? One possibility is that the universe was fine-tuned by a supreme being â God. Although many people like this explanation, scientists see no evidence that a supernatural entity is orchestrating the cosmos.

âNew investigations at an iconic cave site on the Channel Island of Jersey have led archaeologists to believe the Neanderthals have been widely under-estimated.â ..BBC UK

Enough all ready! Several years ago a DNA study showed that Neanderthal DNA matched human DNA to 99.97%. You match your neighborâs DNA to 99.99%. Jack Cuozzo, a dentist discovered that Neaderthal reconstructions had been deliberately tricked up to push their faces forward in order to make their faces appear to be more apelike. Cuozzo Story

But even though science is reporting these recent truths about Neanderthal; that he was fully human, apparently the message hasnât penetrated the entire paleontological community.

We get it. The truth is; we never thought otherwise and in fact creationists were there from the beginning–from Genesis. If it was me Iâd start to get irritated if people kept making a big deal about how âfully humanâ I am…BBC News UK

Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

Popular American culture has an exceptional ability to transmit its attitudes, its mores, and it’s standards both in America and internationally.

It enculturates us with the dominant ideologies and we knowingly or unknowingly tend to adopt its traditions and practices. This is why for example little girls of color can prefer dolls that donât look like themselves, their parents or their brothers and sisters. This same effect can impact brunettes, who our culture appears to value less than blondes. Thin is in. Sexuality; omnipresent. Youth is good -age and maturity; bad.

Those messages have been received.

How about the messages our media and culture transmit about God and evolution? How is the culture doing in transmitting the dominant ideology there? The culture says that âcreationistsâ are at best gullible and at worst idiots. The popular media reports evolution as fact. Evolution âadvancesâ often lead the news and are imparted as truth.

The culture reports on God and God centered beliefs- like man and dinosaur interraction or Noahâs ark, if “forced” to with a wink and a smirk. Governor Palin was not considered a good vice-presidential candidate by many “cultural elites” in the last National election for among other things, stating that she believed that man and dinosaurs lived at the same time. (Of course some concerns about the Governor were valid.)

If the media and the culture are unafraid of offending the segment of the population who believe in God, Noah’s ark etc., then that group must be a small group of weirdoes and mouth breathers whose offense wouldnât cause a ripple, right?

So how is the culture doing in transmitting the âevolution is true, God and the great flood of Noah are mythological” ideology to the American public?

âAn ABC News poll released in Feb 2004 found that 61 percent of Americans believe the account of creation in the Bible’s book of Genesis is “literally true” rather than a story meant as a “lesson.” Sixty percent believe in the story of Noah’s ark and a global flood, while 64 percent agree that Moses parted the Red Sea to save fleeing Jews from their Egyptian captors. The poll, with a margin of error of 3 percentage points, was conducted Feb. 6 to 10 among 1,011 adults.ââŚWashington Times

There may be newer polls out there, this one was compiled 6 years ago. I doubt however, if much has changed in the six years since. (That was the latest I could find on belief in Noah’s ark and special creation)

Inside the numbers, 75% of âProtestantsâ believed in the story of creation, 79 percent in the Red Sea account and 73 percent in Noah and the ark. For âevangelicalsâ the numbers were 87%, 91% and 87%, respectively. For Catholics, the polling showed 51 percent, 50 percent and 44 percent respectively. Draw your own conclusions from that data.

A 2007 Harris Poll of almost 2,500 adults indicated that more Americans believed in Satan and a literal hell than believed in Darwinism. That survey also found that 82% of Americans believed in God – a figure that was unchanged from polling taken the two previous years.

âIt further found that 79 percent believed in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, while 72 percent believed that Jesus is God or the Son of God. Belief in hell and the devil was expressed by 62 percent.ââŚ.Reuters UK

(Shockingly, Charles Darwin himself now believes that hell is a literal place. Only 42% of Americans expressed a belief in Darwinâs theory of evolution.)

“Born-again Christians are more likely to believe in the traditional elements of Christianity than are Catholics or Protestants. For example, 95 percent believe in miracles, compared to 87 percent and 89 percent among Catholics and Protestants,” according to the poll.

“On the other hand only 16 percent of born-again Christians, compared to 43 percent of Catholics and 30 percent of Protestants, believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution.” ..Reuters UK

Atheists like Richard Dawkins have for some time been mystified by the failure of the majority of Americans to enculturate themselves with this atheistic, evolution ideology. Even insulting and ridiculing those who hold these beliefs has not moved the needle muchâexcept in Europe.

What accounts for the fact that Americans readily adapt, accept and reflect all those other cultural ideologies and beliefs but continue to believe in God and creationism even though those beliefs are portrayed as ignorant, âuncoolâ and backwards?

And why doesnât the media accurately reflect the truth that the majority of Americans think that the evolutionists and the Atheists are the ones out of the mainstream? (Seriously, if most Americans believe why does the media portray it otherwise? What do they get out of it?) Are you going to believe us (the media) or your own lying eyes, they ask?

How does belief in the God of the Bible survive this toxic environment?

Itâs because God exists and His Word is true.

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? New International Version (ÂŠ1984)

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species Photo: s8int.com

More than half of the public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a “designer” must have lent a hand, the findings suggest.

And one in three believe that God created the world within the past 10,000 years.

The survey, by respected polling firm ComRes, will fuel the debate around evolution and creationism ahead of next week’s 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, said the findings revealed a worrying level of scientific ignorance among Britons.

In the survey, 51 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that “evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages”

A further 40 per cent disagreed, while the rest said they did not know.

The suggestion that a designer’s input is needed reflects the “intelligent design” theory, promoted by American creationists as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

Asked whether it was true that “God created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years”, 32 per cent agreed, 60 per cent disagreed and eight per cent did not know.

The findings â to be published tomorrow in a report by Theos, a theology think-tank â follow a row over the place of creationism in education.

A recent poll of science teachers found that one in three believe creationism should be taught in science classes alongside evolution and the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

However, Michael Reiss, a biologist and Anglican cleric, was forced to resign as the Royal Society’s director of education after suggesting that creationism should be discussed in lessons “not as a misconception but as a world view”.

Speaking at the British Association Festival of Science at the University of Liverpool last year, Professor Reiss estimated that about one in 10 children was from a family which supported a creationist rather than evolutionary viewpoint.

He said his experience had led him to believe it was more effective to include discussion about creationism alongside scientific theories, rather than simply giving the impression that such children were wrong.

The research for Theos shows that the level of support for creationism is much higher than Professor Reiss’s estimation, but also indicates that many people who believe in God also consider evolution to be the most realistic explanation for the origins of living things.

Paul Woolley, the director of Theos said: “Darwin is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause.

“The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.”

While many fundamentalist Christians believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible’s account of the earth’s creation, the Church of England last year issued a statement conceding it had been over-defensive in dismissing Darwin’s ideas in the past.

The Church launched a website promoting the naturalist’s evolutionary views on which it said: “Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still.”

Prof Dawkins expressed dismay at the findings of the ComRes survey, of 2,060 adults, which he claimed were confirmation that much of the population is “pig-ignorant” about science.

“Obviously life, which was Darwin’s own subject, is not the result of chance,” he said.

“Any fool can see that. Natural selection is the very antithesis of chance.

“The error is to think that God is the only alternative to chance, and Darwin surely didn’t think that because he himself discovered the most important non-theistic alternative to chance, namely natural selection.”

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, accused Dawkins of evolving into a “very simple kind of thinker”.

He said: “His argument for atheism goes like this: either God is the explanation for the wide diversity of biological life, or evolution is. We know that evolution is true. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

“I’m an evangelical Christian, but I have no difficulties in believing that evolution is the best scientific account we have for the diversity of life on our planet.”